14 January 2025
What, and who, is EU law for?
The nine articles discuss the evolving methodological approaches in EU law, highlighting the growing interest in reflecting on the purpose and beneficiaries of EU law. This new reflection is welcomed in a field that for a long time has understood itself as formalistic and self-contained.
However, critical legal approaches remain marginal.
As explained by Dr Isailović, ‘’…by critical legal approaches, I mean those that describe and critically analyse the inner logics of the law in light of their continuous reproduction and legitimation of intersecting forms of power asymmetries based on gender, class, race and sexuality—among others.’’
Critical legal approaches engage with marginalised knowledges and perspectives such as feminist, gender, queer, postcolonial and colonial studies, critical race theories—among others—to open up legal and policy issues to inquiries about the distribution of material resources, coercion and freedom.Ivana Isailović
The short essays in the special issue seek to contribute to the many existing efforts to centre critical legal approaches in the EU legal field and offer reflections on what a broader distributive analysis in the field may look like. Essays span across different EU law fields: from EU environmental law and policies, to competition, anti-discrimination, and asylum law.
Fernanda G. Nicola, Ivana Isailović, Floris de Witte, Janine Silga, Annette Schrauwen, Iris Goldner Lang, Sanja Bogojević, Andrew Woodhouse, Giacomo Tagiuri
The special issue is a follow-up to the conference organized by Dr Isailovic at the end of 2021, entitled; EU Law and Social Justice. (See the recordings from the conference and accompanying suggested readings from the speakers.)